Review
This is a linkpost for https://chipmonk.substack.com/p/the-absence-of-self-rejection
I suppose there is always some "ideology" behind self-rejection, but perhaps it makes a difference whether that ideology is against your feelings on the object level, like "feelings are for losers" or "this specific feeling makes you a loser", or on the meta level, like "thinking about your feelings is a waste of time".
I mean, if it is the latter, it should be easier to overcome if you happen to be in a situation where you can't do anything else, for example you are traveling by train and you forgot to bring a book, or you are hiking. Or it someone tries to start this topic with you. But if you have direct objections against feelings, you will actively oppose the opportunity to think about them.
I used to think that self-acceptance was an action. That there was an “accept myself” mental motion I could execute.
I had tried to “accept myself” many times, but it never seemed to do anything.
Nowadays, I think “self-acceptance” is a misnomer and mostly doesn’t exist. Instead, I think self-acceptance is really about untangling all rejection.
For example, I noticed that I was somewhat emotionally numb, and I wanted to feel all of my feelings. The common advice for this is often "just try to pay more attention to your feelings" or "just accept them!" But these suggestions miss a crucial point: if we’re not feeling our feelings, it’s because there’s a payoff to rejecting them.
Here’s a sketch of the process I used:
1. Find the wanted feeling: I found how the state of “being aware of my feelings” feels in my body. What’s it like? What body part is it in?
In my case, a certain expansiveness in my chest.
2. Find unconscious blocks: I asked the expansive feeling I wanted to feel in my chest, “What bad thing happens if we’re aware of our feelings?”
I heard:
No wonder I felt emotionally numb!
And while these predictions were attempting to help me, I had to wonder, was there a way I could feel my feelings and get more of the benefits and less of the harms?
3. Ask incisive questions:
“Will feeling our feelings make us less productive, or will it help us focus on what’s meaningful?”
The fear dissolved into laughter.
“Do we want to be hanging around people who we’re afraid that expressing ourselves will make them angry, anyway?”
The answer was obvious.
“Is it true that feeling our negative emotions will be harmful?”
It became apparent that negative feelings themselves weren't harmful. They could even be helpful: they could indicate where we wanted to improve the world and our interpretations of it.
And now that there was no conflict, the “we” fused back into “I”.
Ever since then, I feel a lot more.
I’ve made a lot of progress on “accepting” my feelings by untangling why I was unconsciously rejecting them.
Thanks to Stag Lynn, Kaj Sotala, Damon Sasi, Epistea Residency, CFAR, Anna Salamon, Alex Zhu, and many others for mentorship and support.